=Order=, _Juglandaceæ_ (Walnut family).--Native deciduous trees of large size, with compound serrate leaves with an odd number of leaflets, varying from five to fifteen in the different species, the three terminal ones usually much the largest, the lower ones on opposite sides of the rather stout leafstalk. Male catkins slender, cylindrical, pendulous, two to six inches long, three in a cluster, on a naked peduncle or stalk (Fig. 46) springing from the base of the terminal buds of the previous season's twigs, and just below the first set of new leaves in spring; calyx unequally three-parted; stamens three to eight. Female flowers two or more in a cluster, from the end of the new growth of the season, which becomes the common peduncle or fruit-stalk of a single nut or cluster of nuts. The flowers are destitute of petals; stigma short, broad, and four-lobed; husk fleshy or leathery, smooth, very thick in some species and thin in others, partly or wholly four-lobed, opening in some, allowing the nut to drop out at maturity, in others adhering, falling off entire when ripe. Nuts with hard, bone-like shell, round or oblong, smooth or deeply four to six angled, somewhat flattened or compressed in most of the species; kernel two-lobed, oily, sweet and delicious, as in the common shellbark hickory, or extremely bitter, as in the bitter nut. =History.=--The early white settlers of the Atlantic States found the hickory nut in common use among the Indians, who gathered and stored them in large quantities in the fall, for food during the winter months, and while our ancestors who sought to make homes in the western wilderness may have appreciated these luxuries, they needed land for cultivation, and to secure it the forests were destroyed, with no thought of preserving trees that would yield food for themselves or succeeding generations. Not only were the forests cleared away, as things to be banished from sight and mind, but as the hickories yielded superior timber for various agricultural and other implements, as well as for fuel, they were often sought for and utilized in advance of the general clearing of wood lands, and the first to feel the woodman's axe. William Bartram, in the account of his travels through the Southern Atlantic States, from 1773 to 1778, and published in Philadelphia in 1791, says, in referring to these nuts, that they are held "in great estimation with the present generation of Indians, particularly _Juglans exaltata_, commonly called shellbarked hickory; the Creeks store up the latter in their towns. I have seen above an hundred bushels of these nuts belonging to one family. They pound them to pieces, and then cast them into boiling water, which, after passing through fine strainers, preserves the most oily part of the liquid; this they call by a name which signifies 'hickory milk;' it is as sweet and rich as fresh cream, and is an ingredient in most of their cookery, especially in hominy and corn cakes."